What a Reasonable Copyright Small Claims Court Would Look Like

Creators have an uphill battle in enforcing their rights online. A small claims court to allow creators to exercise their rights without full federal litigation is a good goal, and one that should be pursued. The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019, also known as the CASE Act, presents one potential, but flawed framework for such a court. It is not, however, the only potential framework. A robust, well-designed system would be designed to balance the interests of legitimate claimants and defendants against those of bad actors seeking to turn the forum into a quick cash grab. Below, we look at the key features of such a system, and why they’re important.

The BOSS Act Protects Both the Rights and Pocketbooks of Event-Goers

This week, Congressman Pascrell (D-NJ), Congressman Pallone (D-NJ), and Senator Blumenthal reintroduced the BOSS Act in a renewed attempt to bring transparency and fair practices to the online market for event tickets. Public Knowledge applauds the Act, which looks to end the worst abuses of the consolidated ticket sale/resale market while maintaining an individual ticket holder’s right to do what they want with the ticket they purchased.

Net Neutrality: Not New, But More Important Than Ever

Today marks the one year anniversary that the repeal of net neutrality, led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, went into effect. We’re reflecting on what has happened in the past year, and urging the U.S. Senate to step up and pass the Save the Internet Act to restore strong net neutrality consumer protections and enshrined them in statute.

Last week, thanks to investigative reporting, we learned that Facebook discovered in January that it was storing millions of users’ passwords in plain text format, making them fully readable for thousands of its employees. Facebook has acknowledged that this was a serious security error and privacy breach on its side, as its systems, ideally, “are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable”, and promised that it “will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way.” There is no evidence that any of the thousand employees with access to these unencrypted passwords actually accessed them, but Facebook’s decision to remain mum reveals an important lesson for the overarching privacy and security policy debate. Importantly, data security incidents are a widespread problem that goes well beyond Facebook.

Consumer Privacy Before Congress This Week: What We Learned and What’s Next

This week featured back-to-back privacy hearings on Capitol Hill to discuss principles for federal privacy legislation. With the one-year anniversary of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation implementation coming in May and the California Consumer Privacy Act taking effect in 2020, industry players that have fiercely lobbied against federal privacy legislation in years past are now suddenly calling on Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy bill this year. Here’s a quick look at what happened in each hearing and a few key takeaways.